Russian language

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.

Copyright The Columbia University Press

Russian language, also called Great Russian, member of the East Slavic group of the Slavic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Slavic languages). The principal language of administration in the former Soviet Union, Russian is spoken by about 170 million people as a first language. It is a second language for additional 100 million in the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (the former Soviet Union) and of Eastern Europe. Closely related to Russian are the other East Slavic tongues, Ukrainian (also called Little Russian or Ruthenian) and Belarusian (or White Russian). The former is spoken by about 45 million people, mainly in Ukraine and Russia. The latter, which also uses a form of the Cyrillic alphabet, is the tongue of about 8 million persons, most of whom live in Belarus. Because of its large number of speakers and its leading position in the former Soviet Union, Russian is one of the chief languages of the world; at the same time, a number of non-Russian former Soviet republics, most prominently the Baltic nations, have move to replace Russian with the local language as the language of government, commerce, and education and to adopt English as a second language. Used officially by the United Nations, Russian is important in scientific writing as well. The great literary works written in Russian also have made the language culturally significant.

Pronunciation and Grammar

It is difficult to master Russian pronunciation because the accent is free; that is, it can be placed on any syllable. Thus, there being no set rules for stress, the accent of each word has to be learned separately. In fact, the position of the accent on a given word may vary as the word's case and number change when it is declined. Some words that are spelled alike are distinguished only by a different stress. In addition, no significant differentiation is made between long and short vowels. Grammatically, Russian is highly inflected. The noun has six cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and locative), with an occasional seventh case, the vocative. There are three declensional schemes and three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter. Although the verb has only three tenses (past, present, and future), it is enabled by a feature called aspect to express numerous subtle shades of meaning, some of which cannot be rendered even in English. In addition the Russian verb has five moods and four voices.

Historical Development

The historical development of Russian is not easy to trace because until the 17th cent. the religious and cultural language of the Russian people was not Russian, but Church Slavonic. However, within Russia the latter language became sufficiently altered by the vocabulary and pronunciation of spoken Russian to be transformed into a Russian form of Church Slavonic adapted to Russian needs; this change began in early times. The earliest extant document containing Russian elements is an Old Church Slavonic text from the 11th cent. Ukrainian texts can be distinguished from Russian by the late 13th cent., but Belarusian does not definitely appear as a separate language before the 16th cent.

When Peter the Great undertook to Westernize Russia in the early 18th cent., the Russian language was subjected to Western influences and absorbed a number of foreign words. Peter was the first to reform and simplify the Cyrillic alphabet used for Russian. In the late 18th and early 19th cent., partly as a result of the work of the great Russian writer Aleksandr Pushkin, the Russians succeeded in throwing off the dominance of Church Slavonic and in developing their own tongue into a literary language, which was, nevertheless, influenced and even enriched by the Church Slavonic legacy. Literary Russian is based on the dialect used in and around the city of Moscow, which became the leading cultural center of the country in the 15th cent. Extensive reforms, aimed at simplifying and standardizing Russian writing and grammar, took place after the Revolution of 1917.

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RUSSIAN

RUSSIAN The major language of the Slavonic branch of the INDO-EUROPEAN language family, the language of the Russian people and the state language of the former Soviet Union, written in Cyrillic script. It has c.150m native speakers, and at least another 50m inhabitants of the ex-Soviet territories, and others, use it as a second language. Although the vast majority of its speakers live in the successor States of the USSR, Russian is used internationally in economic, scientific, and military contexts, and in the UNITED NATIONS Organization, where it is one of the six official languages. A thousand years or more ago, a relatively undiversified East Slavonic dialect, generally known as Old Russian, was spoken in and around the approximate area of present-day Western European Russia, the Ukraine, and Byelorussia. Out of it emerged the Russian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian languages. An early form of standard modern Russian developed in the 16c, centred on the educated speech of Moscow, and was influenced from the 17c onward by other EUROPEAN LANGUAGES, especially Dutch and French. It gained international status in the 19c because of the power of Imperial Russia and the achievements of such writers as Pushkin and Tolstoy. The Revolution of 1917, which led to the creation of the Soviet Union, associated the language closely with the maintenance and spread of Communism.

Russian in English

The impact of Russian on English has been slight in comparison with that of French or Spanish, but many of its loanwords stand out because of their exotic spellings and connotations. BORROWINGS fall into two broad categories: (1) Traditional cultural expressions: bors(c)h a soup based on beetroot, borzoi (swift) a kind of hound, czar/tsar (from Russian tsar′, from Latin caesar) emperor, king, dros(h)ky (from drozhki) an open, four-wheeled carriage, r(o)uble the unit of Russian currency, steppe (from setp′ lowland) a prairie, troika (threesome) a carriage drawn by three horses side by side, a group of three acting together, a triumvirate, vodka (diminutive of voda water) an alcoholic drink. (2) Soviet and Communist usage: gulag (acronym of Glávnoe upravlénie ispravítel′no-trudovȳkh lagereǐ Main Directorate of Corrective Labour Camps) a labour camp, especially for political prisoners, kolkhoz (from kollektívnoe khozyáǐstvo collective household) a collective farm. This group contains many expressions, including acronyms, coined in Russian from Latin and Greek: commissar (from komissár) a political officer; agitprop political agitation and propaganda (from the organization title Agitpropbyuro, from agitatsiya and propaganda), apparat party organization, Comintern/Komintern (from Kommunistícheskǐ Internatsionál) the Communist International organization (1919–43), cosmonaut (from kosmonávt ‘universe sailor’) a Soviet astronaut, intelligentisia intellectuals considered as a group or class.

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Russian

Russian of, pertaining to, or characteristic of Russia.Russian doll each of a set of brightly painted hollow wooden dolls of varying sizes, designed to fit inside each other.Russian Orthodox Church the national Church of Russia, a branch of the Eastern Orthodox Church.Russian Revolution the revolution in the Russian empire in 1917, in which the tsarist regime was overthrown and replaced by Bolshevik rule under Lenin. The Russian Revolution of 1905 is the name given to a demonstration in St Petersburg of that year, which was fired on by troops. The crew of the battleship Potemkin mutinied and a soviet was formed in St Petersburg, prompting Tsar Nicholas II to make a number of short-lived concessions including the formation of an elected legislative body or Duma.Russian roulette the practice of loading a bullet into one chamber of a revolver, spinning the cylinder, and then pulling the trigger while pointing the gun at one's own head, said to have originated among Russian officers in the early 20th century.

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Russian

Rus·sian
/ ˈrəshən/
•
adj.
of or relating to Russia, its people, or their language.
•
n.
1.
a native or national of Russia. ∎
a person of Russian descent.
∎ hist.
(in general use) a national of the former Soviet Union.
2.
the East Slavic language of Russia.
DERIVATIVES:Rus·sian·i·za·tion
/ ˌrəshənəˈzāshən/ n.Rus·sian·ize
/ -ˌnīz/ v.Rus·sian·ness
n.

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Russian

Russian Official language of the Russian Federation and several other republics that belonged to the former Soviet Union. It is the primary language of c.140 million people, and is a second language for millions more. It is the most important of the Slavic languages, which form a subdivision of the family of Indo-European languages. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

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